It is expected that, before long, the mobile terminal will become for many people the primary access point to the Internet and the enabler of secure location-based and personalized services. All service or content providers will, therefore, have the opportunity to develop and provide end-user services that securely package and attune content to the user's location and needs in a mobile environment.
To that end, agents are regarded as very promising, especially in connection with the explosion of information and services on the Internet. Agents are software that act on behalf of a principal (a user or subscriber) to reach a goal, perform a task, or solve a problem for the user. For example, agents might filter information for the user, determining which news articles, documents, Web-sites, and the like, are interesting for the user on the basis of a user-profile that stores the user's interests.
Particularly relevant to the present disclosure are agents that will be referred to as “proxy agents.” The term proxy in connection with the present disclosure has a particular connotation, as set forth below.
Proxies mediate requests between entities, such as, for example, between a client application (browser) and a server. For the purposes of the present disclosure, a proxy agent acts on behalf of a user to accept and filter solicitations made to the user by other entities such as service providers and applications. The proxy agent serves two purposes: (a) it protects user privacy and (b) it enforces user's policies and communicates user preferences for personalization.
User profile (and other identity-based) information is widely used to deliver personalized web-based services. Currently, such profile information is specific to particular services, resulting in a fragmentation that requires a user to specify and update their profiles with multiple service providers. Identity architectures such as .NET My Services and Liberty Alliance propose third-party profile services, offered by a Profile Service Provider (PSP) to multiple other service providers linked in a federation. These architectures primarily address a relatively static network of service providers that have agreed to identity federation. They address the fragmentation problem at the expense of requiring identity federation, and are not well suited to dynamic push-commerce opportunities targeted at mobile users.
Specific embodiments of the present disclosure exploit the advantages of proxy agents for the delivery of personalized services to mobile Web users without requiring federation membership, i.e., static business alliances and identity relationships envisioned in standards like Liberty Alliance.